If unscrupulous undertakers pilfered gold crowns, could they buy a couple extra hearses?
A. A couple spare tires maybe. There’s only a tenth of an ounce or so of gold in a crown, worth around $23, says Sam Insana, of Dental Prosthetics of Tucson. The rest is strengthening metals. So the crowns would have to be taken to a refiner first, lowering the profit margin. And since most places won’t work with small quantities of scrap metal, “unless the mortician saved a huge supply of these crowns, it would not be worth the cost of the potential legal hassles.” Q. Legend has it the King of Persia asked the inventor of the game of chess what he wanted as a reward. “A grain of wheat on the 1st board square, 2 grains on the 2nd square, 4 grains on the 3rd, 8 on the 4th, etc.” was his answer. Did the king comply? A. Sounds reasonable. But if you run 2 to the 63rd power through a calculator, you’ll see the 64th square alone would have needed 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains–more than the world’s annual wheat production, says Richard Phillips in “Numbers: Facts, Figures & Fictions.” Th
